Ask a typical voter what “economic development” means and you’ll often get the same answer: a vague sense of backroom deals, developers in suits, and politicians cutting ribbons in front of buildings most residents will never walk into. It’s easy, in that fog, to assume the winners are always the “big guys” and the losers are ordinary taxpayers.

Spend an hour with the Aurora Economic Development Council, and that picture changes.

Wendy Mitchell, the AEDC’s president and CEO, starts with a deceptively simple sentence: “We bring jobs to Aurora.” Not shoppers. Not boutique restaurants that shuffle dollars around Havana or Colfax. Jobs. Primary employers. As one of her colleagues put it, a primary employer is a company that brings at least half its income into the community from the outside. They expand the economic pie instead of just slicing it differently.

That distinction matters. Retail and service businesses are vital to daily life, but they largely circulate money that’s already here. A data center, a defense contractor, a manufacturer shipping product across the country — those are the firms that pull new income into Aurora, support families, and broaden the tax base that pays for roads, police, and parks.

Aurora happens to have three assets that make that job possible: land, a generally business-friendly local government, and an economic development shop that has learned how to move faster than its competitors. “We have available land, we have a business-friendly government, and we will work harder and faster than any other group out there,” Mitchell told me. In the world of site selection, that last phrase — harder and faster — is not a slogan. It’s the scoreboard.

Companies making location decisions don’t live in a world of abstractions. They live in the world of calendars and cash flow. They want to know whether they can be from dirt to doors-open by a specific date. Aurora’s pitch is simple: Tell us when you need to be open, and we’ll back into a timeline, coordinate the moving parts, and hit it. Time to market becomes our incentive.

That approach helped Aurora beat one of the most aggressive competitors in the country. When Philip Morris International chose to build a large manufacturing facility here, Florida was a primary rival — and, in Mitchell’s words, “they backed up the money truck.”

Colorado can’t and doesn’t try to compete on raw subsidy. Instead, AEDC offered certainty: power delivered, permits secured, workforce partners at the table, and support from groundbreaking through opening and expansion. PMI chose Aurora. Incentives matter, but confidence counts more.

This is where the quiet word “concierge” comes in. For a company that knows no one in Colorado, the maze of agencies, utilities, school districts, and training providers is daunting. AEDC’s six-person team functions as a single front door. They help navigate state job credits and workforce training funds, coordinate with utilities, shepherd projects through planning and permitting, and even help plan the ribbon-cutting and media.

None of this happens in a vacuum. AEDC’s “most important relationships,” she emphasized, are with the City of Aurora and the two counties it serves, Arapahoe and Adams. Without those partners, AEDC can’t do much more than make introductions. With them, the council can align planning, infrastructure, public safety, and incentives around a common goal: get the project in on time, under budget, open and paying taxes.

That partnership runs deeper than City Hall. AEDC works with the Aurora Chamber, workforce centers like Arapahoe/Douglas Works and Adams County Workforce, the Community College of Aurora, Pickens Technical College, and the Fitzsimons Innovation Community, among others. When PMI identified a gap between the workers it needed and the workers available, AEDC and its partners didn’t shrug — they helped design a training program to close the gap.

Not every job in Aurora will be at a Raytheon or a major medical campus, nor should it be. Mitchell is clear about the importance of a diversified economy. High-wage jobs in aerospace, defense, and corporate headquarters are crucial, but “not everybody can work at Raytheon. Not everyone has a PhD and can get security clearance.” A healthy city also needs manufacturing, logistics, and entry-level jobs that allow residents to get a foothold, learn on the job, and move up.

Mitchell has been at this since 2001. AEDC has been at it since 1976. In that span, Aurora has gone from a city without the Anschutz medical campus; without the E-470 corridor development; without the emerging Aerotropolis, to a city increasingly on the radar for aerospace, health care, logistics, and advanced manufacturing.

Aurora’s future doesn’t hinge on clever slogans or feel-good resolutions. It hinges on whether we keep doing the hard, unglamorous work of recruiting primary employers, delivering on our promises, and leveraging public dollars through private initiative. Or, as Mitchell put it in one neat sentence:

“Aurora succeeds when the city and AEDC work together.”

Michael A. Hancock is a retired high-tech business executive and a Coloradan since 1973. Originally from Texas, he is a musician, composer, software engineer and U.S. Air Force veteran whose wide-ranging interests — from science and religion to politics, the arts and philosophy — shape his perspective on culture, innovation and what it means to be a Coloradan.